That’s fine in this case, but keep in mind that any article questioning climate change will be downvoted because it does not align with majority of HN views. It goes for other topics as well.
Then you essentially getting a consensus view on the topics. I question how much of an information value, knowing the consensus view, brings to the reader.
It’s good to know the consensus view, sure. But you also want to know the actual situation, even if it’s different.
I don’t feel “victimized” by this, just more realization of what am I getting. I definitely not consider this a news anymore, more of a consensus indicator. As such, it has value.
What developers should do on such a critical and long standing issue is to offer an extension that victims can install to volunteer to track the bug. So they can click a button when things are fine to take a snapshot, and click another one when they encounter it.
If it was me running the project there's enough information in that thread to piece together an exploratory testing plan around the issue that might allow us to isolate it, and I'd set aside some time for the team to do that.
Whilst obviously not lethal, this Thunderbird bug sort of reminds me of the Therac-25 incidents in the 1980s. Very occasionally the machine would give patients massive overdoses of radiation. This bug wasn't easy to reproduce (thankfully) and turned out to be due to a race condition.
But of course, you can't find a problem if you don't investigate, and if it's a serious problem that's been documented then, as engineers, we can't just hide behind non-reproducibility as if it's some sort of magic shield. We have a responsibility to investigate and isolate the problem ourselves. If we don't do that we are effectively washing our hands of our own creations.
Not only that. Often mitigations can be placed even if the actual bug cannot be reproduced. Like many others in the thread suggested.
I've encountered several impossible to reproduced bugs in the past. And what I (or my team) would then do, is re-architecture (refactor) some pieces of software so that we could reproduce it. Like e.g. better logging, specialized layers/adapters/services, simpler logic, and -above all- better testability.
It happens to me regularly. You can fix it by redownloading the message from the server using the "repair folder" feature, and I have backup, but it IS infuriating.
I have no good alternative to thunderbird, it does so much of what I want. But this bug is awful.
Note that this is why you use copy, check, then delete, instead of just "move" data, whenever it's important that the process works correctly
Even if the software doesn't have known bugs, I do it if the data is important enough and especially if I were to not have a backup (for example, because the storage provider takes care of backups and redundancy. I personally like to have another copy that I manage myself, but how many people have their IMAP emails or Spotify playlist data backed up for example? I do, but not many people I think)
I have been using TB on all operating systems with 8 or 9 users since 2006 and I never even once encountered this issue.
As a software developer fixing stuff like this is only possible if you can reproduce it or otherwise get logs, telemetry and similar things, otherwise it is pretty much just guesswork.
Granted given the severity of the consequences I would've chosen a more defensive move-strategy (e.g. one that deletes mails only once they have been copied verifiably), but that would have significant performance impacts in the 99.99% of cases where it works, so finding the real problem is preferable.
The truth is that if this happens to you regularly, that you are probably the prime person to gather more data on this. Call it giving back to Open Source software.
> As a software developer fixing stuff like this is only possible if you can reproduce it or otherwise get logs, telemetry and similar things, otherwise it is pretty much just guesswork.
As a software developer you should be able to reason about your code and work backwards from the observed result to investigate possible causes.
When a plane crashes or bridge collapses the engineers tasked with finding the cause don't just throw up their hands if they can't make it happen again.
I think after a few expressions of time blindness, they'll discover that their contracts have continuity deficiency and their career vertical expression challenges.
The feedback of reality will fix it, like for all young people.
>The feedback of reality will fix it, like for all young people.
"A child who isn't disciplined at home, will be disciplined outside of the home" - old African proverb.
The issue is kids growing up without being taught accountability, but instead that they're perpetual victims of "the system" created by evil old white men, and therefore nothing they do is ever their fault. This is the fault of the parents, school system and society as a whole who coddles kids giving them the false sense of security that they can always have their way, right until they hit the brick wall of adulthood featuring employment, bills, debt, responsibilities and self sufficiency.
"Disciplined at home" is being a maybe not perpetual but victim of the system for something like 18 years though.
I don't get where this idea that kids are coddled with comes from. They usually are not even allowed to wear the cloths they want or choose the food they want and get pushed around to silly extents.
In order to hold someone accountable for their actions you need to allow them a choice in the first place. Disallowing children from making choices is one way of protecting them from the consequences of a bad decision: by not allowing them to make it in the first place. That is what coddling is, protecting from the environment. Protecting them from the choice is just a more extreme version of shielding them from the consequences.
Ye. But the hard problem as I see it is the "the consequences of a bad decision" part, for which many "bad decisions" have no consequence but the arbitrary punishment from adults itself.
I.e. not cleaning up toys from the floor. Staying up late. Wearing different colored socks. Playing or speaking too laud. What ever. The consequences of those are really complex or fuzzy and the threshold level for breaking the rules arbitrary.
Also the subset of "bad decisions" that maybe have some distant future bad consequence, i.e. eating too much ice cream, are even harder. Or all the 'none will like you if you do that' things you need to teach kids.
Speak for yourself. I've seen 2 year olds being able to choose their clothes and if they don't get their way, they throw a temper tantrum so bad they vomit.
And I fear, the child will turn into another Cartman. I.e. spoiled beyond any belief.
There’s enormous variation, from giving the kid whatever they want, to giving them no choice and then punishing them for doing what they’re told.
If you imagine it from the perspective of aliens with very different biology, it’s kind of crazy that this important and difficult task is given to people with zero training or qualifications.
I've seen this kind of thing and it annoys me to no end. However that seems to be a small minority among many.
But the majority of young adults are rightfully asking hard questions.
Why should they suffer the consequences of political and corporate mismanagement ? Why is accountability rarely invoked when it comes to people in power? Why is it OK for old disgruntled people to yell at them for things they have nothing to do with? Why should they take us seriously if we don't take them seriously?
Again, I agree with you that some are hiding behind these things in order to deflect blame, but let's not pretend that the young don't have every right to be mad at us.
>Why should they suffer the consequences of political and corporate mismanagement ?
Who said they should? Nobody should ideally, but that's the way the world works: shit rolls downhill. And being a cheeky little shit at work, will not result in a revolutionary change at the top of corporations leadership the way you imagine, but will just result in your direct manager's career being at risk due to your behavior, so you're giving him no choice but to cut you because they're not gonna die on your hill for you. Cultural changes take a long time and need to involve 90%+ of the workforce, not just a few.
>Why is accountability rarely invoked when it comes to people in power?
You know why. Because the rules are made by those in power, and people choose to rise to power in order to make the rules by which others are held accountable.
That's why young people are engaging in the "lying flat" or quiet quitting movements, and voting outsiders of the establishment like Trump, Mamdani, etc. They want to flip the monopoly board over because they know they were dealt a shit hand. And while I'm not that young anymore, I totally support their movement.
Who is "us"? Youths are welcome to get as mad as they like but seething with impotent rage and posting hot takes on social media isn't going to get them anywhere. If they want to improve the world then first they'll have to work hard and pay their dues just like every other generation before them.
Or they could try to start a revolution, but frankly most of them are too weak and fragile to attempt anything that involves real sacrifice and risk.
> But the majority of young adults are rightfully asking hard questions.
As young adults always had, since the dawn of time.
And as they've received and comprehended the answers, most quickly stopped asking.
That is part of what becoming an adult, without the "young" bit, means. It's not like these things are unknowable, or that the "system of things" is secretive. It's all rather obvious - it just takes a little time and experience to figure out the questions and notice the answers.
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> Why should they suffer the consequences of political and corporate mismanagement?
Because that's how it works. It's not that different from asking, why should they suffer the consequences of a tree falling on them and crushing them? Because they happened to stand under it at the time, duh!
Society and civilization aren't fixtures created by nature/God - they're built out of human interactions. People pursuing all kinds of interests, alone or in groups, navigating around each other, cooperating, convincing or coercing each other. It's all abstract systems created and maintained by strangers. And the unfortunate reality is, someone screws up somewhere badly enough, everyone downstream of it suffers.
The sad irony is, the consequences they ask about come from mismanagement of systems that were created in the past to shield people from consequences of failure of earlier versions of the same or similar systems! That's what civilization is, in a way - stacking systemic solutions to problems of previous systems!
The silver lining is in hoping that every iteration makes less people suffer consequences and to a lesser degree.
> Why is accountability rarely invoked when it comes to people in power?
It is invoked much more often than they think, but they're not able to recognize it - it looks different than with people not in power. And it needs to be different, because the situation is different too.
> Why is it OK for old disgruntled people to yell at them for things they have nothing to do with?
Why is it OK for them to yell at old disgruntled people for things they have nothing to do with? Yelling is easy. Understanding that almost no one individually has much influence on how things are, that can unfortunately take a lifetime.
> Why should they take us seriously if we don't take them seriously?
Because that's how life works. It was the same for us when we were young, and for our parents when they were young, etc. Young people don't know shit about life, and don't even realize that yet. Over time, they acquire knowledge, experience and relationships, and various kinds of power - and along the way, they are treated more and more seriously, until they themselves become the people "running things" and start hearing the same questions they used to ask from the next generation of kids.
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To be clear: I'm not saying that things are all ideal, or even perfectly fine. I'm just saying that the answers to those questions aren't mysterious, and figuring them out is exactly what growing up to be an adult in a society looks like. It always has, which is why you can see the exact same complaints about "kids these days" and "old farts" showing up in every period in history, all the way back to ancient Greece and earlier.
I wonder if one could run Delta Chat on top of yggmail[1] (very much an alpha software release) for a truly P2P IM chat. yggmail runs over IPv6 with a tun interface same as yggdrasil. Might test this out at some point for fun.
Not quite the discoverable, user-friendly experience of Briar, Bitchat etc. but it can be combined with online links (Briar can technically go online, but only via Tor; both Briar and Bitchat are only for smartphones).
Delta Chat can already run on top of iroh [0]. No need to find some other server implementation - it can already do "truly" P2P - devices can end up running their own STUN and TURN servers, etc.
Everything in the physical world is the same. There are hundreds of pieces even in the smallest toaster, and no one in the world knows how to make half of one without all those external dependencies:
Even if you consider something like "build a bridge", that classic comparison of software and traditional engineer, all the components of said bridge have been created by someone else with particular expertise. The civil engineer who designed where the iron beams will go played no part in the metallurgy of those beams.
Milton Friedman put it best, in "I, Pencil". Everything around you is the result of hundreds to thousands of economic actors, loosely but robustly coordinated in a way to get you what you actually want at as low of a price as you can get away with. The complexity of the supply chain is the price of admission to the game.
The physical world is bound by rules that are unchanging (more-or-less). Above this layer we’ve also devised and agreed upon standards that remain unchanging, though it’s regional: Voltage, screw/bolt sizes, tolerance levels, materials, material measurements, etc.
At this layer, we’ve commoditized and standardized because it’s useful: It makes the components cost-effective and predictable.
In software and computing, I can only think of the low-level networking standard that remain stable. And even that has to be reinvented somewhat for each OS or each nee language.
Everything else seems to be reinvented or rewritten, and then versioned.
Imagine having to upgrade your nuts and bolts in your car to v3.01 or lose support?
I'm not arguing against component-based architectures. I'm saying we're over-engineering, and it shows. Even toasters are less maintainable than they used to be.
I have no idea when or why this happened but, in my everyday usage, I've flipped the intention of vulgar swear words with the old-fashioned swear words.
Oh frick yes. It also makes you sound like a goodie two shoes schoolboy from a 1950s movie. Has delivered quite a few laughs and joy to people at work.
Perhaps historically, but these days I think spam refers to senders that don't play by the rules. Unsolicited (ie didn't obtain the recipient's address in a legitimate manner), no unsubscribe link (or not honored), technical measures intended to circumvent various filters, etc.
The ugly and awkward thing about the unsubscribe link is I never subscribed in the first place. Someone else did on my behalf. To even ask to be unsubscribed, I feel, is taking some ownership of the subscription and playing into a crooked system. It's like being sent an invoice for something I never ordered and needing to cancel the invoice. And even if you say, "buzz off", who is to say someone won't decide to "resubscribe" you next day, given it's outside your control.
Me personally I won't give a pass to business with an unsubscribe link, I have extreme disgust that we're in some make-believe pretend world that I asked for this in the first place
I’m with you. I learned about the concept of “implicit opt-in / consent” while I was building an email marketing feature on a platform and I found the concept disgusting, but was told that because it’s technically legal, our customers considered it table stakes.
You may define it that way, but the original property of spam seems to apply nevertheless: They are low quality and noone really likes them.
The fact that you have to frame it your way speaks mostly to the fact that apparently your income depends on spam being seen as acceptable and not a scourge to humanity. But that's just my perspective...
That's a rather baseless assumption about my income. Does it really seem so unlikely to you that a reasonable person might not use the exact same criteria as yourself? Why are you so confident in the generalization of your own perspective to the population at large?
Define "low quality" and "not liked". Each person will classify a given message differently. At least in the general case it's hardly realistic to expect a sender to classify a message from the perspective of a specific recipient prior to sending it.
On the other hand, it is reasonable to expect addresses to be acquired via legitimate means (ie collected only with the consent of the recipient) and to cease attempts at contact when requested. That's essentially the boundary between reasonable conduct and harassment.
I did not assume, I drew a conclusion from working on email marketing software and experiencing first hand the worldview that seems necessary to stay in this line of work while avoiding cognitive dissonance.
> At least in the general case it's hardly realistic to expect a sender to classify a message from the perspective of a specific recipient prior to sending it
I guess from the perspective of someone doing mass mailings that is true. A pointer to what I assume is your bias on the topic. But from the perspective of the recipient, who actually has to invest the cognitive effort of reading that message, I think it's only natural to expect a certain amount of average value out of that effort. And lets be honest, that mass mailing doesn't usually deliver that. It's just another trigger designed to manipulate people into buying shit they didn't even really want.
Let's rather have the default newsletter checkbox to be "off" and legal repercussions for repeated offenders, then I'll be on board for the term "reasonable conduct" too.
If I want certain marketing emails for these purposes, I create a rule to mark it read on arrival and moved directly to a certain folder where I can find it when needed. It will still never see my inbox.
